Only persons who contributed to the intellectual content of the paper should be listed as authors. The contribution of each author should be indicated on the title page. All persons who have contributed to the work (http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/defining-the-role-of-authors-and-contributors.html) should be acknowledged.
Authors of reports of original research should present an accurate account of the work performed as well as an objective discussion of its significance. Underlying data should be represented accurately in the paper. A manuscript should contain sufficient detail and references to permit others to replicate the work. Fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements constitute unethical behaviour and are unacceptable.
Authors may be asked to provide the raw data in connection with a manuscript for editorial review, and should be prepared to provide public access to such data (consistent with the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers and The International Association of Scientific, Technical, & Medical Publishers Statement on Data and Databases) if practicable, and should in any event be prepared to retain such data for a reasonable time after publication. Inability to provide raw data when requested would lead to rejection of the manuscript.
Authors should ensure that they have written and presented entirely original work, and if the authors have used the work and/or words of others, that this has been appropriately cited or quoted. All the manuscripts submitted to the journal are screened by one of the joint editors for instances of plagiarism using Crossref Similarity Check (powered by iThenticate).
Peer review assists the editor in making editorial decisions and through the editorial communications with the author may also assist the author in improving the manuscript, whenever this is considered to be appropriate. The name/s of the reviewers will be disclosed to the authors ONLY with the consent of the reviewers for such a disclosure.
Selected referee who feels unqualified to review the manuscript or knows that review will be delayed should notify the editor and leave the review process.
Manuscripts received for review must be treated as confidential documents. They must not be shown to or discussed with others except as authorized by the editor. It is recommended that the reviewers should not retain the manuscripts either in a soft or hard copy format.
Reviews should be conducted objectively. Personal criticism of the author is considered to be inappropriate and unacceptable. Reviewers should express their views clearly with supporting arguments.
Reviewers should also identify relevant published work that has not been cited by the authors. Any statement that had been previously reported should be accompanied by the relevant citation. A reviewer should also call to the editor's attention any substantial similarity or overlap between the manuscript under consideration and any other published paper of which they have personal knowledge.
Privileged information or ideas obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not used for personal advantage. Reviewers should not consider manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies, or institutions connected to the papers.
Only manuscripts submitted via the online portal will be considered for peer review. The manuscripts submitted are initially assessed initially by the Co Editors and a decision made regarding further processing. Primary Editorial Rejection is undertaken for articles manuscripts that are found to be incomplete based on submission requirements not suitable for publication in the journal or those that fall outside the scope of the journal.
If online submissions are incomplete, authors may be contacted by the editorial team requesting completion of submission requirements at the editors discretion.
Once a decision is made to process the article, it is assigned to a Section Editor, with expertise in the respective field of study. Two peer reviewers are assigned by the Editors and Section editors. The peer review process is double-blinded. When deemed necessary, the article would be sent to a separate Specialist Reviewer.
If and when there is no agreement among the reviewers, the manuscript would be sent to another independent reviewer.
Comments from peer reviewers are examined by the Section editor and a decision of Accept/ Requires revision/ or Reject is made based on the recommendations of the reviewers and authors are informed by email. We attempt to make this process as fast as possible and try to get a decision back to authors within 6 weeks.
If the decision is ‘Requires revision’, authors are then given a period of 2 weeks to revised and / or rebut the reviewer comments and resubmit the revised manuscript. The revised manuscript will be evaluated by the Section editor and Editors and a final decision will be made on acceptance or rejection of the manuscript. If a 2nd round of peer review is deemed necessary, the revised manuscript will be reassigned to the original peer reviewers or to new reviewers and the process will begin again until a final decision is reached. The total time from submission to final decision is approximately 3 to 4 months. All accepted manuscripts will be published in the next issue of the SLJM to be published. (publication frequency)All communications with authors will be via email through the journal management system or the journal email address (sljmksm@gmail.com) If there is no response from the authors, a reminder will be sent giving the author another fortnight (two weeks) to respond. If there is no response by that deadline, the article will be rejected and archived.
Any manuscripts written and submitted by the Co Editors, Assistant Editors, Section editors or a Member or Members of the Editorial Board, or manuscripts where family members of such editors or members are authors, will be reviewed independently without any participation of the author/s or relative concerned. In such circumstances, two or more independent external reviewers are recruited. The authors do not take part in any of the decision making processes and are always requested to leave the discussion site whenever such processes take place.
The Co Editors are responsible for the final decision on which of the articles submitted to the journal should be published. They are guided by the Section editors and Editorial Board and the assessments made by the reviewers. The final decisions are also balanced by constraints such as legal requirements including potential libel issues, copyright infringements and plagiarism.
Editors would, at any time, evaluate manuscripts for their intellectual content without regard to country of origin, race, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship, or political philosophy of the authors.
Editors and any other editorial staff would not disclose any information about a submitted manuscript to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, specialist reviewers, other editorial advisers, and the publisher. Even such disclosures would be made only when they are considered appropriate. The editors would always use their discretion to prevent access to the details of submitted manuscripts by any person or agency that is not mentioned in the aforesaid documentation.
Unpublished material disclosed in a submitted manuscript would not be used in an editor's own research project without the express written consent of the author. The Co Editors and Section editors are expected to declare all existent and even potential conflicts of interest related to any manuscript, dating back to a maximum of three years prior to the date of submission of the manuscript.
The Co Editors and Section editors will take all necessary steps to safeguard all interests and safety of human and animal subjects of any manuscript submitted to the journal by way of policies that are laid down on these events in a definite specified way as depicted later on in these policy statements.
Any manuscript that has been previously uploaded as a pre print to a data repository, in its present form or as a previous version, where the same work is presented, is still acceptable for consideration for publication by the SLJM. However, the authors must declare in the Covering letter that the manuscript has been previously made public and make available the link to the repository where the manuscript is stored.
Plagiarism is totally unacceptable to the journal and if proven, it will compel the editors to take any punitive action that may be indicated. Plagiarism is deemed to include the following:
An author should not in general publish manuscripts describing essentially the same research in more than one journal. Even submitting the same manuscript to more than one journal concurrently constitutes unethical publishing behaviour and is totally unacceptable.
Proper acknowledgment of the work of others must always be given. Authors should cite publications that have been influential in determining the nature of the reported work.
Submitted manuscripts will be check for plagiarism at two stages. At initial submission, the manuscript will be checked through ithenticate and if significant plagiarism (>30%) is detected, the manuscript will be rejected immediately. If manuscripts pass this initial screening and are accepted for publication after peer review, before authors are notified, a second screening will be done. If the revised manuscript shows significant plagiarism (>30%) the manuscript will be rejected at this stage.
We encourage authors to make their data sets available for use by other academics, either as supplemental files available with the manuscript or on request by email to the corresponding author. A statement regarding data availability must be made in the title page of each submission and if data is to be made available, such a statement will be included in the final published article.
All correspondence should be addressed to the Co-Editors at sljmksm@gmail.com or via the Journal website at https://sljs.sljol.info/contact/
Any conflict or issues of concern regarding publication ethics discussed by the Editorial Board, and will be resolved as per the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines. For more details see https://publicationethics.org/
Journal editors may request retractions in cases of evidence of unreliable data, plagiarism, duplicate publication, or unethical research. Authors can also request retraction, but the feasibility and procedure of retraction will be decided by the editorial board, and depends on the publication stage of the article.